Planetary Group Seminar: Thermal Studies of the Main Rings of Saturn with the Cassini CIRSinstrument (A. Flandes)

  • Tea and coffee will be served at 15:15. You are cordially invited to attend this little break to get in touch and exchange some scientific observations with the speaker.
  • Datum: 07.07.2016
  • Uhrzeit: 15:30 - 16:30
  • Vortragende(r): Alberto Flandes
  • Instituto de Geofísica, National Autonomous University of Mexico
  • Ort: MPS
  • Raum: Auditorium
  • Gastgeber: Urs Mall
Planetary Group Seminar: Thermal Studies of the Main Rings of Saturn with the Cassini CIRSinstrument (A. Flandes)

Saturn’s rings are a complex collection of ice particles with diameters from 1m to few meters. Their natural window of study is the infrared because its temperatures are between 40K and 120K. The main driver of the temperature of these rings is the direct solar radiation as well as the solar radiation reflected on Saturn’s atmosphere. The second most important energy source is the infrared radiation coming from Saturn itself. The study of the variations of temperatures of the rings may provide important information on their composition, their structure and their dynamics. Models that consider these and other energy sources are able to explain, to a first approximation, the observed temperature variations of the rings. The challenge for these models is describing accurately the variation of illumination on the rings or how the illuminated and non-illuminated surface areas of the ring particles change at the different observation geometries.

In this talk, I will show a semi-analytical model that considers the average properties of the main rings and uses the ray-tracing technique to define the shadowing on the rings in order to describe the ring temperatures observed by the Composite Infrared Spectrometer, CIRS, onboard the Cassini spacecraft, which is in orbit around Saturn since 2004.die
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